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CHAPTER 1

Shakespeare in English, English in South Africa

In her 2007 European Union Literary Award-winning first novel, Kopana Matlwa presents an engaged critique of the primacy of English in the ‘new’ South Africa. Coconut is the story of two young women, Ofilwe and Fikile. The former is part of the emerging black middle class, and has ‘lost’ her culture for an Englished identity in a world of ‘white’ privilege that will never truly accept or know her. Eating with her family at an otherwise whites-only restaurant, she thinks,

We dare not eat with our naked fingertips, walk in generous groups, speak merrily in booming voices … They will scold us if we dare, not with their lips … because the laws prevent them from doing so, but with their eyes. They will shout, ‘Stop acting black!’ ¹

The latter is desperate to acquire the glamour and power of whiteness in order to escape the poverty and deprivation she sees as intrinsically ‘black’:

‘And you, Fikile, what do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘White, teacher Zola. I want to be white.’ …

‘But Fikile dea r… why would you want to do that … ?’

‘Because it’s better.’

‘What makes you think that, Fikile?’

‘Everything.’ ²

Part of acquiring whiteness and the class advancement that goes with it is acquiring English, and with it an implictly Anglo-American culture which is relentlessly ‘white’. This is Ofilwe’s ironic ABC:

After-Sun. Bikini. Ballet. Barbie and Ken. Cruise. Disneyland. Disco. Diamonds and Pearls. Easter Egg. Fettucine. Frappe. Fork and Knife. Gymnastics. Horse Riding. Horticulture. House in the Hills. Indoor Cricket. Jungle Gym. Jacuzzi. Jumping Jacks and Flip Flacks. Khaki. Lock. Loiter. Looks like Trouble. Maid. Native. Nameless.

No, not me, Madam. Napoleon. Ocean. Overthrow. Occupy and Rule. Palace. Quantity. Quantify. Queen of England. Red. Sunscreen. Suntan. Sex on the Beach. Tinkerbell. Unicorn. Oopsy daisy. Unwrap them all at once! Video Games. World Wide Web. Wireless Connection. Xmas. Yo-yo Diet. You, You and You. Zero guilt. ³

Matlwa’s novel is an attack on ongoing systemic racism and its links to what the book sees as the power bloc that is whiteness and Englishness: the two are inseparable. Thinking of her cousins in the townships, whose parents did not advance economically and who did not have access to the education she was given, Ofilwe says:

I spoke the TV language; the one Daddy spoke at work, the one Mama never could get right, the one that spoke of sweet success.

How can I possibly listen to those who try to convince me otherwise? What has Sepedi ever done for them? Look at those sorrowful cousins of mine who think that a brick is a toy. Look at me. Even the old people know I am special…. They smile at me and say, ‘You, our child, must save all your strength for your books.’ Do you see, I always tell my cousins, that they must not despair, as soon as my schooling is over I will come back and teach them English and then they will be special too? ⁴

Shakespeare has a small but significant cameo role in the book, as the rhetorical trappings in the speech and subjectivity of an emasculated, abusive, poor, black man with a useless English education. Unlike Ofilwe’s English, which makes her special, Uncle’s Shakespearean English just makes him exploitable and, in Fikile’s words, pathetic.

This book takes Coconut’s understanding of the intertwining of whiteness, Englishness, and social and economic power as its starting point and its end point. Apposite to this discussion is the assumption embedded in the very idea of a coconut that culture and identity are and should be contained, controlled, pure, and raced. Immediately following the extract above, where Ofilwe naïvely celebrates how her English, linked to her class status, makes her ‘special’, Matlwa inserts the following vignette:

Katlego Matuana-George, dressed in a Vanguard Creation, sells the cover of this month’s Fresh magazine. Katlego, the former principal dancer of the renowned Von Holt School of Modern Dancing … shares that she tries to have as many equestrian weekends with her husband Tom at their farm in the north as possible. It helps to ground her and allows her the latitude to reflect on her life.⁵

‘Katlego Matuana-George’ is not a character in the book and does not recur. She is clearly a satire on a blackness saturated with class privilege and the veneer of whiteness that goes with it. Her clothes, her ‘modern’ dancing, her white husband and their ranch ‘in the north’ are all indicators of a blackness not just altered but ameliorated by its exposure to cultural colonisation.

The relationship between all these markers – identity, language, race, and, as Matlwa’s novel also painfully shows through Fikile’s association of personal advancement with whiteness, class – is exemplified in the history of how English came to South Africa, who spoke it, why, and how. Gender is also a factor in this history, not least because it is often missing. One of the many interesting contributions Coconut makes to this issue is the fact of its protagonists’ and its author’s gender – the first comment by a female insider since Noni Jabavu’s autobiographical The Ochre People (1963).⁶ Gendered experience features in aspects of the novel’s detail – in Ofilwe’s internalisation of ‘yo-yo dieting’, and in both girls’ obsessions with their hair and Fikile’s with her green contact lenses. It also features in the implication at the end of the novel that Fikile is headed towards sexual exploitation by an old white man: ‘Anything worth having in life comes at a price, a price that is not always easy to pay. Maybe Paul is right … He seems to really like me … What do I have to lose?’⁷ The obvious answer, everything she has left of her already battered sense of self, speaks in a gendered way to what the novel presents as the cost of exposure to a world by now saturated with commodification, economic, social, and linguistic power relations, and perverted racialised values. As I explained in the introduction and as I will go on to explore in more detail in this chapter, while it is imperative to remain cognisant of the very real violent histories behind this understanding of identity, race, and language in the region, the either/or presentation of the possibilities for being South African in Coconut are limiting. More than this, the argument that to be black means one cannot also own English or modernity is reductive of current identifications and ignorant of an extremely rich and important local history as well.

Exploring the multilayered history of English in South Africa – as a language, as a formal field of study, in its relation to the processes and structures of colonialism – enables us to see some of the complexities of what it means to be South African: what it means now, and what it always has meant, despite rigorous attempts by apartheid engineering to suggest otherwise.⁸ This social and political history, embedded as it is in multiple complicities and contradictions of identification, enables us to see why Coconut’s vision of the relationship between race, culture, privilege, and language, important as it is not least for its articulation of intransigent structural racism as well as for its introduction of gender as an important issue, is flawed. More than this, it can be dangerous. This is evident when we look at how the link between race, culture, language, and a sense that privilege is ‘white’ (disavowing the new economic privilege on the rise in the country) is being deployed when some politicians find their backs to the proverbial wall. Just one example is erstwhile ANC Youth League President Julius Malema’s extraordinary verbal attack on BBC journalist Jonah Fisher in 2010. Fisher challenged Malema’s criticism of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change party for having offices in the affluent Johannesburg area of Sandton. This, Malema suggested, made them inauthentic. Fisher pointed out that Malema himself lives in Sandton. Malema’s response was to call for Fisher’s removal from the press conference, accusing him of racism, and of participating in the white/English control of international media spaces which by definition disrespected the ANC and black people in general.⁹ Malema’s defensive aggression, here and elsewhere, is predicated on the presentation of white people as by definition not, and anti-, African, as conspiring to keep economic privilege to themselves, and as enacting a politics of resentment towards black men who have ‘made it’ in ‘white’ terms. In this racialised performance, there is no room for the idea that to be South African is to exist in a complex personal and social relation to markers of race, privilege, language, and culture.

I am not presuming to sum up the content of a South African identity, or to contain it in a label. Focussing on an aspect of how English and Englishness has helped to shape some of us, and has in turn been shaped in specific ways here, enables us to see that binary constructions of identity and culture are artificial constructs. It also enables us to see the ways in which some of the positions taken by our current leadership in the name of an African identity politics are much more historically complicated than their rhetorical performances might suggest. Whether this is Thabo Mbeki’s investment in an African Renaissance,¹⁰ Julius Malema’s invocation of an old colonial rhetoric, often to silence opposition¹¹ (which I think of as Mugabism, in its patent self-servicing and when placed together with the self-enriching activities of these men who claim to act in the name of a post-colonial justice for ‘the people’), or Jacob Zuma’s deployment of tribal authenticity to justify his gender politics,¹² these constructions of the genuinely African rely on a binary version of whiteness. This politically useful Africanness, while it speaks to real, ongoing issues of inherited inequalities which remain primarily raced, is artifically purified, purged of the messiness of historical interaction. Examining the role of English in colonising South Africa, and the ongoing legacies which have resulted, is one way to point to the actual complexities at work, and to counter the current tendencies to return to a simplified and simplistic racialised discourse of us and them. It also forces us to keep centre stage the issue of class and gender privilege that has always been a part of this history, and, of course, to acknowledge the ways in which colonialism denigrated ‘black’ cultures.

I aim to investigate the complexities of Englishness in South Africa through the thoroughly overdetermined figure of Shakespeare – overdetermined simultaneously as the sign of English Literature and as the sign of universal humanity, and overdetermined as a marker of culture. We cannot, and should not, deny our fraught history of unequal power relations and colonial, apartheid, and, indeed, neo-colonial and neo-apartheid exploitations. Nevertheless, the presence of English here, as a language and as a series of texts available to South African writers, has always meant more than the simplistic presentation of ‘the West’s’ cultural hegemony over a putatively ‘pure’ African space or subject can capture.

In this chapter I sketch what English first meant to those South African subjects who encountered it as formational of their social and, to a greater or lesser degree, personal identities. This takes us back to the time of the mission schools and the initial colonial encounters which helped to forge a new class of African men. Within the history of an English and Englishing education, I will focus on Shakespeare’s role as the ubertext of English Literature, and the way ‘his’ texts and ‘his’ signifying potential were taken up by a specific, central figure. Solomon Plaatje, a founding member of the ANC and of indigenous journalism, and a political and linguistic activist, was also a founding South African Shakespearean. His use of Shakespeare combines these two activisms, demonstrating how Shakespeare has been made indigenous. Crucially, Plaatje’s life story and his work also demonstrate how the South African history of oppression and struggle were formative of this indigenous Shakespeare, which went on to exceed colonial control.

I suggest ways in which this colonial history, and Shakespeare’s place in it in particular via the example of Plaatjie,¹³ can be read as a complex, complicitous, contradictory commentary on why colonial binaries like the West/Africa, or English/indigenous languages, or Shakespeare/indigenous cultures do not adequately describe who we are. I am not saying that Shakespeare’s universality made ‘him’ available to Plaatje or other South Africans. As should be clear by now, I am suspicious of the politics of universality. Neither am I suggesting that Shakespeare was a colonising force whose influence created coconuts in the original sense. Although Shakespeare can be said to be an agent of coconuttiness from the beginning, in that the texts and their symbolic weight influenced the writing styles and psyches of some South Africans from within an education system that affected their personal subjectivities, these first coconuts should be seen to stand for an aspect of our history we can value. I want to show how, as an instance of one kind of South Africanness, our history both reveals the immense and significant investments of all kinds in the construction of the figure of Shakespeare, and also demonstrates why we cannot simply dismiss ‘him’ as a Western, colonial import. But first: why Shakespeare? Why is Shakespeare the gold standard of English Literature and Literariness?

Shakespeare in/and English

English as a subject has its own disciplinary history. Within the field of study that is English Literature, or what I will often designate Eng Lit, Shakespeare occupies a special place because of ‘his’ canonicity. Why Shakespeare became ‘Shakespeare’ in this context, why it was this particular writer whose texts came to stand for all that Eng Lit is and should be, is an ongoing question whose answer very much depends on your ideological positioning for or against the idea of literature as transcendental and apolitical.

As part of its development as a discipline, English Literature was fundamentally concerned to find ways to identify and evaluate the highest, best expressions of what it means to be human. Whether the origins of the discipline are considered to be in the emergence of the humanities from the study of rhetoric and from the European culture wars of the eighteenth century, in Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century educational interventions, in colonial education practices, or in the professionalisation of the subject in the early twentieth century, Eng Lit has been developed around a concern to identify and evaluate ‘the best’ written cultural expressions of human life, even if those criteria have since been radically expanded.¹⁴

However, as a number of critics have pointed out, the project of developing a canon of the best literature in English was always implicated in a complex political field that it disavowed for a long time. For example, a collection of essays edited by Peter Widdowson sketched the discipline’s various ideological and material constituting factors; Gauri Viswanathan has detailed the colonial politics behind the development of the formal study of Eng Lit; Terry Eagleton has argued that its institutionalisation was informed by a nostalgic, conservative ideological programme, and one deeply implicated in class and gender politics. More recently, Neil Rhodes has also argued for the imbrications of gender and class politics in the development of English Studies, from as far back as the Renaissance.¹⁵

In Shakespeare Studies in particular, the universal Shakespeare which is one of the cornerstones of the discipline came under fire for being classed, raced, and gendered. Furthermore, ‘his’ supposed apolitical universality was revealed to be ideologically complicit with the oppressive bourgeois practices of the state.¹⁶ Shakespeare’s putative universality was interrogated in material terms, and responsible historical accounts attempted to trace the process through which ‘his’ reputation was accrued, instead of assuming its self-perpetuating and self-evident nature.¹⁷ It is these investigations which have made possible the challenge to the universal Shakespeare as self-evidently the best human culture has to offer, when that apparently universal human culture happens to belong to a specific time and place and does not, in fact, speak equally or equally easily to all humans.

Despite these academic ‘discoveries’, Shakespeare retains ‘his’ place in popular culture as the marker of high human culture.¹⁸ In a South African context, this positionality has been used to invoke a range of references, resonances, and self-fashionings, as the rest of this book illustrates. For now, the point I wish to stress is that despite a history which clearly demonstrates a vexed, complex, ambivalent, contradictory position for Shakespeare in our region, and from there for the Englishness ‘he’ has come to stand for, Shakespeare keeps coming up as a signifier of a binary relation. This relation is more or less overtly raced and classed, depending on the situation.

That Shakespeare keeps standing for something else – culture, whiteness, literature (implicitly English) – is clear in the commotion which followed a group of teachers’ suggestion to the Gauteng Education Department in 2001 that certain Shakespeare plays be banned from school syllabi. Plays earmarked for removal included Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello (for being racist), Julius Caesar (‘because it elevates men’), and King Lear (for being ‘full of violence and despair’).¹⁹ These teachers were clearly motivated by some sort of awareness of the findings of the work outlined above, and trying to be responsible about the ideological power of Shakespeare and the messages being transmitted through education. But both the attack on the Shakespearean texts, and the responses in the press, spoke to a host of other anxieties underlying what this literature stood for in people’s minds.²⁰ This is not to deny that any discussion of the details, role, or purpose of English literary studies in post-apartheid South Africa must take cognisance of the debates about Shakespeare as an agent of various kinds of colonisation, as well as the debates about colonising languages in neo-colonial situations.²¹ Shakespeare, as the icon of Eng Lit and of a particular kind of cultured Englishness, remains a potent signifier of what English stands for in South Africa, even if what exactly that is, is variable depending on the times and the person or community.

English in South Africa

If there is a lingua franca in South Africa, it is Zulu.²² But English is the language of power – the means to social and economic advancement – as it was in the days of the mission schools. From the early 1840s, missionaries facilitated the first printed vernacular texts. These were all religious. However, South Africans wrote Christian texts not only because they were converts: as colonisation impacted on the existing social, political, and economic structures, Christianity and an education in English and the Englishness it transmitted were the means to succeed in the new system.²³ In post-apartheid South Africa, English remains the language it is necessary to know in order to advance economically and politically, and so socially.²⁴

Despite never having been the most-spoken language, in other words, English was the most powerful language during the development of formal education in the region, and the social changes this system helped to effect. Leon de Kock points to the inescapable multiple violences of this history when he says:

[T]he orthodoxy of English as a dominant medium of educational discourse in South Africa, and the institutionalisation of this discourse (by which English ‘literature’ is privileged as an area of study), was won by blood … the ascendancy of English as a principal medium for social empowerment among many black South Africans was secured in the nineteenth century on frontier battlefields by colonial soldiers.²⁵

The supremacy of English within the educated elite carried through into the formation of the liberation movement, whose leaders were from this elite. With the passing of the Bantu Education Act in 1953 as part of the formalisation of apartheid, the mission schools were effectively closed during the 1950s. The Bantu Education Act was designed to terminate access to the social and economic mobility enabled by a mission-school education because of the threat this educated class fraction posed, as a source of leadership, and to the increasingly white-protectionist labour market. It is from this fraction that the ANC was born, and thus from which the upper echelons of the current political ruling class in South Africa have emerged, at least until the presidency of Jacob Zuma (this change is significant for my final conclusions about the symbolic status Shakespeare now occupies in the South African public sphere).

English was not only a tool of self- as well as social empowerment under colonialism. It was also useful during apartheid. Es’kia Mphahlele, one of our finest writers in English from the mission-educated generations, has written about the ways in which English functioned as a language of resistance during apartheid.²⁶ He also spoke about the personal gains brought by a fluency in English as the language and the culture that helped to shape the boys who attended the mission schools: ‘English which was not our mother tongue, gave us power, power to master the external world which came to us through it.’²⁷ If English has always been a language of personal power as well as an aspirational language, its status as such was exacerbated by apartheid policies of ‘retribalisation’ and by Bantu Education, which made it clear that education in the venacular was intended to be second-rate.²⁸

Another reason English enjoyed its status as the language of resistance under apartheid was the (now problematised) position of Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor. As the language of the educated, English is implicated in class hierarchies which are more important now than they were under apartheid, when the exigencies of Struggle called for the sublimation of differences among the oppressed. In post-apartheid South Africa, as Graham Pechey points out, ‘[f]luency in English is virtually synonymous with literacy’,²⁹ which means with class advantage. Coconut ends up despairing of this fact, as it concludes with the words of a clearly good man whom Fikile meets on the train, and who talks about watching his daughter on the playground at her elite school. At first he acknowledges the integration that an education in English has enabled:

And then suddenly a little chocolate girl walks past me, hand in hand with the cutest half-metre milk bar I have ever seen in my life. Both of them are chatting away … He smiles at the memory. Wow! I thought, look how happy they are.

But then he goes on:

They were so joyful, those kids. But, you know, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were only happy because they didn’t know. Don’t get me wrong, the school is remarkable, it really is … [J]ust by looking at Palesa, you can just see that she is such an inspired little girl with so much to offer the world. Compared to other children her age in the township, who go to black schools, she is miles ahead … But, I can’t shake a certain feeling … [L]istening to all those little black faces yelping away in English … just broke my heart … Standing at the edge of that playground, I watched little spots of amber and auburn become less of what Africa dreamed of and more of what Europe thought we ought to be.³⁰

Palesa’s father could be describing a child at a colonial mission school when he speaks of the ‘opportunities those children get at that school’,³¹ and the way her education positions her as someone with ‘so much to offer the world’, specifically because it equips her with a fluency in English and an acculturation to the dominant ideological system. Of course, notable again is that the coconuts in this book are all female, with the exception of the failed coconut, Fikile’s uncle. This is one change which marks progress of a sort from then till now: opportunities are available to some girls as well as to their brothers. However, Matlwa is emphasising not the opportunity, but the cost of coconuttiness, in part by sliding back into the reified, binary positions exemplified by ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe’ in the mind of Palesa’s dad.

Scholars from a range of disciplines have examined the implications for elite South Africans of the hegemonic dominance of English. The mission school disseminated what Graham Duncan has called ‘coercive agency’:³² along with Christianity, the missions taught a colonial and colonising ideology which shaped their students even as the black South African men resisted and responded to the message that their cultures and languages were in need of improvement and replacement. Scholars of mission schools and their effects, and the early South African writers in English, all emphasise the ‘ambiguous qualification’³³ which an education in English language and literary culture entailed. For example, in his autobiography Tell Freedom, Peter Abrahams, one of the first black South African writers to acquire an international career and the first to write an autobiography in English, details the effects of his mission-school education in pre-apartheid days. It gave him his vocation (specifically, he says, Shakespeare inspired in him the desire to write, and to become educated in English literature). It gave him a deep sense of justice and of a shared humanity through the Christian ideology he was taught. It also made the hypocrisies of South Africa in the world outside the schoolroom walls inescapably obvious and intolerable. And, as he goes on to chart in his life story, his education makes it impossible for him to return to his family and the community from which he came.³⁴

As Abrahams suggests, the Englished South African subject has been described as split. While a postmodern understanding would see all subjectivity as split or fractured, and would understand this as unproblematic, the splitting effects of English have been repeatedly presented as fracturing a subject who would otherwise be authentically whole: in saving, English also spoils. Bloke Modisane writes bitterly of the experience of being a ‘Situation’, ‘the eternal alien between two worlds’³⁵ as a result of his propensity for a cultured ‘white society’, membership of which was denied him by early apartheid legislation and attitudes. Duncan traces this split condition back to the mission schools, describing how Lovedale created ‘dislocated individuals and groups’, alienated from their societies of birth and also excluded from ‘the Western European lifestyle they aspired to’.³⁶ But the Englished South African’s ‘Situation’ can be read as something other than the position of eternal exclusion, particularly if one is looking pre- and post-apartheid.

English has always played a more complex role in South African identities and societies than Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s famous explication allows. I do not wish to deny the region’s painful history of struggle, to celebrate its effects, or to blithely overlook the reality of ongoing relations of material and discursive power kept in place by the dominance of English resulting from this history. However, colonised subjects made use of colonial tools of oppression, often in order to construct themselves as resisting subjects, albeit with complications and complicities. This use implies a process that resulted not only in the cultural colonisation of the African mind, but also in African ownership of colonial texts, icons, and languages. It is a contradictory and traumatic process, with ramifications for identity on personal and cultural levels. But language can become a tool for the comprador speaker, because comprador identity, the access to the colonial world gained though language use, comes about not solely through the acquisition of the colonial language, but ‘through the act of speaking itself, the act of self-assertion involved in using the language of the colonizer’.³⁷ The subject speaking English in South Africa will always be more than the sum of the colonial process; the forms taken by agency cannot be underestimated.³⁸ If millions of Africans by now speak English, is English not an African language, one as deeply implicated in history as any other language – not universal, in other words, and not straightforwardly liberating, but ‘authentically’, contradictorily African? Like any other aspect of identity? Like the African coconut?

Solomon Plaatje: The first South African coconut

For elite African men at the turn of the century of high colonialism, English was a very important medium as well as a personal and artistic source of useful and sometimes enriching content. It was, as it remains, a means for socio-economic advancement. It was a mine of literary wealth, interesting for its own sake and for the messages about universal humanity conveyed through the teaching of Eng Lit. Deploying English and the literature that went with it was the means to publicly stake a claim to personhood in the terms of the ruling regime; it enabled a demonstration and provided a vocabulary that was meant to help in the fight against colonial patronage and its hardening racism. Leon de Kock has shown how and why African intellectuals seeking to forge a literary and human presence embraced English as a ‘universal’ and universalising language. He notes also the complexities and complicities of this position:

The writing of ‘literature’ in English was an uneasy negotiation: in its dense web of textuality were multiple constraints and restraints. One didn’t just take English and make literature in a vacuum … Many early works of black South African writing in English attest to this unease in the very forms, idioms, and registers employed in writing for a readership that did not really exist in any significant numbers except as an imaginary community where English and the values it was held to represent approximated the ideals of civil egalitarianism … English was a discursive site riven with contradiction – offering entry to a larger world, a more global imaginary, but hedged by the constraints of a colonizing ideology.³⁹

De Kock goes on to offer an argument for recognising the complexity of African identifications with British identity and Western acculturation, for taking seriously the desire to participate in and to own what these things offered and stood for: civility, modernity, Christian brotherhood, equality. He argues that the South African response to colonisation was never one of pure oppositionality; instead, African leaders used the discourses, ideas, and ideologies brought by the colonisers to demand inclusion into the civil imaginary and into state structures, and sought to counter racism by calling for the recognition of their ability to live up to all the terms designated by the colonisers as the marks of human development and ‘civilisation’.

Equally, Bhekizizwe Peterson has recently stressed how writing in English by African intelligentsia at the turn of the twentieth century was an act of self-assertion, a performance of African modernity: ‘The new African intelligentsia drew on their mastery of literacy and African orature in order to claim and defend their rights as modern citizens.’⁴⁰ They engaged with British imperialism in the terms in which it presented itself to them: as a viable ally against Afrikaner nationalism. Nonetheless, they occupied a vexed position. As loyal citizens of Britain, they articulated a commitment to, and in so doing called upon, the liberal values being asserted in the name of Empire. At the same time they faced ongoing and worsening hardship as the hypocrisy of British liberal discourse regarding race in South Africa became increasingly clear. English became at once a resource in the fight for political rights and for the rights of indigenous cultures, a creolising force in personal identities and in cultural developments, a marker of acculturation and modernisation, a false promise … complex and contradictory indeed.⁴¹

We could reformulate these nuanced descriptions of the complexities of identification and performances at the time, as signifiers of a reformulated coconuttiness. This new definition reclaims the pejorative term as signifying a form of elite African modernity that is as much a ‘true’ part of African history, and Struggle history, as any other. We see all the markers of this coconuttiness in the work of Solomon Plaatje, and the double-edgedness of it in the progression of his life’s writing as it responded to the events he lived through.

Plaatje’s life story is by now well known; I will not rehearse it in detail here.⁴² Born in 1876, he was a man of extraordinary ability and range of activity. He was a founding member of the political organisation that would become the ANC, a leading journalist, a diarist and letterist, a linguist, a professional interpreter (he spoke nine languages), a ‘native’ ethnographer deeply rooted in his Barolong identity, a Christian, the first black South African novelist in English, and the first translator of Shakespeare in southern Africa. He also wrote political texts which are literary in their skill, and travelled internationally campaigning for the increasingly receding rights of black South Africans as the twentieth century began. He was largely self-educated and life-educated, coming of age in the cosmopolitan town of Kimberley,⁴³ but he did have connections to the mission-school system. He grew up and was partially educated, until 1894, at the mission station at Pniel. He died in 1932, still fighting for the dwindling political and linguistic rights of black South Africans.

In terms of my argument, Plaatje is the archetypal coconut for a number of reasons. He was ‘[a]rguably the pre-eminent literary figure present at the moment of the first formation of South Africa as a single political entity’.⁴⁴ This literary skill was manifest in both English and Setswana, and in his complex creations and translations between the two cultures, their literatures, and the forms those literatures took.

Indeed, Plaatje has been read as the first, and the most proficient, African writer in the acts of translation in all senses: ‘Plaatje was … literally, almost quintessentially, interdiscursive.’ This interdiscursivity includes the ways in which he incorporated orature into his writing, allowing African practices and values to interpenetrate with the English in which he was also highly skilled.⁴⁵ As a result he created what is arguably a truly South African literary discourse, made up of both/and, not either/ or. For example, Deborah Seddon has written about Plaatje’s interdiscursive mediation between Setswana orality and Shakespeare, arguing that he ‘reactivates’ the oral elements in Shakespeare.⁴⁶ This is one way to recognise Plaatje’s contribution to Shakespeare, without privileging Shakespeare as the signifier of a culture and a process of acculturation to which Plaatje was subjected. Instead, in Seddon’s reading, Shakespeare is equally subjected to Plaatje. This reading recognises Plaatje’s agency and creativity.

Plaatje was interdiscursive in other, non-literary ways as well. As a global traveller in political campaigns, Plaatje was part of the multinational group of colonial elites who influenced one another’s nationalist identities and agendas.⁴⁷ While this international colonial resistance has been shown by Boehmer to characterise and influence the development of profoundly national anti-colonial struggles, it foreshadows modern globalised formations. As much as he was a man of his times, Plaatje was also a coconut for being ‘a forerunner, a harbinger of the … transnational networking which … has distinguished late twentieth-century South African culture in particular’.⁴⁸

There are other ways in which Plaatje’s coconuttiness presaged some of our current issues. Boehmer maps the complexities of Plaatje’s identifications – as a spokesman for ‘his people’ and a member of the petit-bourgeois educated elite, as a loyal subject of Britain and of the Empire, as a self-consciously ‘civilised’ black man, and as a tireless critic and skilled satirist of the hypocrisies and limitations of his white rulers.⁴⁹ Boehmer characterises Plaatje’s multifaceted, paradoxical self-positioning as ‘that overdetermined Janus ability to face in at least two if not several directions at once’.⁵⁰ His multilingualism, as much as his role as cultural and linguistic translator in the permanent contact zone that was his life and milieu, made him emblematic of a South African possible way of being – always bearing in mind the class, if no longer gender, elitism of this position, its reliance on educational opportunities and the social flexibility they bring. Boehmer also suggests that in his writing style he instantiated the racial inseparability for which he so fervently campaigned all his working life.⁵¹

Finally, Plaatje is a coconut because of his association with Shakespeare, that ultimate signifier of fluency in English and of Englishness. He has been appreciated as a potential South African Shakespeare.⁵² He has also been seen as a representative of the emerging petit-bourgeois African class whose love of Shakespeare becomes a delineating marker of education and civility, and he has been both praised and criticised accordingly.⁵³

Plaatje and Shakespeare

Plaatje makes multiple and repeated use of Shakespeare across his oeuvre of political and creative writing, as well as in his linguistic activism. For example, his novel Mhudi (first published in 1930), which was in part an engagement with the increasingly oppressive legal situation in general, and land politics in particular, draws on Shakespeare thematically and stylistically.⁵⁴ He also quotes King Lear in Native Life in South Africa in order to authorise his rage and despair at the effects of the 1913 Land Act.⁵⁵ Furthermore, in his introduction to Diphosophoso, his Setswana translation of A Comedy of Errors, Plaatje says that he translates Shakespeare in order to prove Setswana’s worth and thus attempt to ensure its survival; he is clearly invoking Shakespeare’s status as the best English can do to demand equal respect for a language fast being transformed by colonial and missionary intervention.

To illustrate the creativity of coconuttiness as well as its multiple simultaneous positionalities, I use as an example here what Plaatje does with and to Shakespeare in his contribution to Isaac Gollancz’s A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916). Gollancz’s edited text, assembled for the 1916 tercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare’s life, was an extraordinary work of colonial writing. Coppelia Kahn has shown how, as it drew together contributions from within and across the Empire in the name of Shakespeare as the signifier of English and Englishness itself, the collection allowed for the cultural performance of an idealised, reified Englishness and a counter-performance from national Others which undermined this project: ‘The poet of Englishness, readily available to any imperial subject educated in “the English-speaking tradition”, is blithely enlisted in support of agendas to unseat that very tradition.’⁵⁶ This is done by activating the paradoxical meaning of Shakespeare as at once quintessentially English and the embodiment of human universality. This ideological project – to make Englishness at once specific and universal – is part of the core work of Empire, Khan suggests. She shows how the presence of imperial voices in the Book of Homage was enlisted to confirm the universality of Shakespeare and thus of Englishness, and, in the logic of the universal Bard, of Englishness and thus of Shakespeare. But she also shows how the colonies had other ideas, as the colonies always do. She discusses the ways a number of contributers, Plaatje among them, make use of Shakespeare’s signification to assert their own political points, thus ensuring they ‘re-envision Shakespeare, dismantling his links to England and to empire’.⁵⁷

Kahn focuses on Plaatje’s linguistic activism for Setswana, arguing that here, as I have suggested above he did elsewhere, ‘Plaatje respectfully engages Shakespeare in the project of preserving and/or reinventing his own culture’.⁵⁸ Kahn discusses the way Plaatje claims Shakespeare’s texts for African cultural expressions,

the forms customary and useful in Setswana culture … Thus his tribute to Shakespeare serves not ‘the English speaking tradition’, but rather his own tradition, placed in danger of extinction precisely because of British imperialism, which at the same time provides Plaatje with some of the implements for its tenuous preservation.⁵⁹

An example of this double-edged Shakespeare can be found in Plaatje’s insistence that the deaths of ‘King Edward VII and two great Bechuana Chiefs – Sebele and Bathoeng’ could be equally marked by a quotation from Shakespeare.⁶⁰ Equally, his concluding sentence to his contribution to the Book of Homage stresses ‘that some of the stories on which [Shakespeare’s] dramas are based find equivalents in African folk-lore’.⁶¹ This is the best illustration, under the circumstances, of the universal quality of African culture, and hence evidence that it is not Other, inferior, barbaric, or in need of alteration.

Seddon argues that we need to ‘extend’ this focus on how Plaatje used Shakespeare, to look in more detail at how he interdiscursively navigated his native orality, and the acts of translation in which he was engaged as a cultural and political activist. By circulating and performing orality in print, making use of the creative and political potentials in Shakespeare’s texts in multiple ways, ‘Plaatje’s work sought to create and circulate alternative combinations of tradition and modernity within his own political and cultural context’.⁶² Thus Plaatje can be read not only as invoking Shakespeare’s status in the Book of Homage to counter racism and to make a claim for the equal humanity of Africans. His invocation of Shakespeare in this collection also functions to construct what I am calling a coconut consciousness, in the name of demonstrating the full complexity of what it meant to be an African, and an African subject of Empire.

David Schalkwyk comments on the complexities of Plaatje’s modes of address to his different audiences, and how this is reflected in his use of pronouns.⁶³ Here is an example from the Book of Homage, where Plaatje compares Shakespeare’s plays to the racist messages conveyed in contemporary films, one of them made by the Ku Klux Klan:

Shakespeare’s dramas, on the other hand, show that nobility and valor, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any color. Shakespeare lived over 300 years ago, but he appears to have had a keen grasp of human character. His description of things seems so inwardly correct that (in spite of our rapid means of communication and facilities for traveling) we of the present age have not yet equaled his acumen.⁶⁴

Plaatje, writing in London, speaks to an English audience when he denotes himself and his audience as ‘we of the present age’. In speaking in English, of Shakespeare, Plaatje demonstrates that he shares with his audience an appreciation of Shakespeare as well as a modern cosmopolitanism. Plaatje has claimed the language and its most famous son as his own, and in living that identity, in the act of writing, he self-consciously also counters typical colonial charges against African subjects of Empire, of barbarism or backwardness. At the same time, Plaatje’s allusion to the inwardly incorrect nature of ‘the present age’, ‘in spite of our rapid means of communication and … traveling’, allows him to critique the ignorance implicit in the racism in the films to which he refers. He also implicitly invokes Shakespeare’s putative universally human status to endorse this judgement.

In all this, we see how Plaatje used Shakespeare to make a claim for his, and his people’s, already-proven inclusion in the realm of imperial citizenry and the modernity it claimed to stand for. This claim is indeed Janus-faced: in claiming space in imperial universality, Plaatje simultaneously deployed Shakespeare as ‘a useful instrument with which to sustain his own culture, language, and political identity’.⁶⁵

But Plaatje does not just have Shakespeare to use as a tool. Plaatje relates an anecdote of how Shakespeare’s English functioned as the language of love between himself and his wife-to-be (they both read Romeo and Juliet, he goes on to say, since their cultural situation mimicked the play’s):

While reading Cymbeline, I met the girl who afterwards became my wife. I was not then as well acquainted with her language – the Xhosa – as I am now; and although she had a better grip of mine – the Sechuana – I was doubtful whether I could make her understand my innermost feelings in it, so in coming to an understanding we both used the language of educated people – the language which Shakespeare wrote – which happened to be the only official language of our country at the time.⁶⁶

If this is allowed to be not just the chance for him to make a political point about English rule and the responsibilities that should implictly come with that status towards such obviously Anglo-identified subjects, but also the record of a moment of intimacy and connection not only through but with a literary text, Shakespeare is clearly not just a tool. ‘His’ texts, their literary power, their putatively universal messages have been interpolated and owned, claimed.

Plaatje and the others that followed him were Englished subjects, subjects of and in English. But not in a slavish or solely colonised sense, pace Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s formulation. Reading Plaatje positively as a coconut is a way to take seriously the elite colonial subjectivity he can be made to represent. His paradoxical stance becomes the picture not of the ventriloquising subaltern, able only to mimic, however subversively. Taking Plaatje’s coconuttiness seriously is a way to see him and the men of his class as far more complex than simply positioned in relation to the colonisers who may have had a lot to do with determining the terms of possibility for them, but certainly did not control their responses, much as they may have tried. Plaatje, and the coconuts who follow, born into the cultural, political, and social ‘Situation’ which was and is South Africa following on from Plaatje’s time, were legitimate African subjects.

Indeed, Plaatje’s coconuttiness could be said to exemplify the way identity functions, especially in as complex a space as post-apartheid South Africa:

A subjectivity such as his, inhabiting a place of difference so clearly constructed for it and aspiring in every way to counter the fixed conceptions attached to it, can only be aware of the provisional nature of identity, especially as it is developed within cross-cultural representations.⁶⁷

The spaces of human interaction after colonial contact, fraught and unequal as they were and as they remain, produced subjects who can never return to a place of imagined pure Africanness, if indeed such a place ever truly existed. Instead, for those of us able to occupy the elite space of even relative economic stability, coconuttiness can be the marker of a constituting interdiscursivity which is as African as the history of South Africa itself. Like Plaatje’s Shakespeare, the African coconut is both/and, both Englished and transforming of Englishness. And this is a legitimate South African identity.

English in South Africa, Shakespeare in South Africa

There is no intrinsic reason why Shakespeare’s texts should be made to speak to South African issues outside of the inheritances of the colonial system which entrenched Shakespeare as the paragon of literature. At the same time, there is an African Shakespearean tradition which exists in our history, which begins with Plaatje, and which is absent from most South Africans’ experiences of what Shakespeare can and does mean. This is clear in Matlwa’s novel, where the weak and emasculated Uncle stands for what the educated Englished black man can become in post-apartheid South Africa. This is a sharp comment on the figure of the earlier, mission-educated young man, who was meant to be groomed as a leader of ‘his people’, and was skilled to navigate the new system on their behalf:

Uncle just came home after his first semester at the University of Cape Town with a letter of exclusion from the medical school in his bookbag … He lay in bed for weeks sobbing … and that was the end of Uncle the smart one, the one who spoke the white man’s language, the one who would save us. ⁶⁸

For Matlwa, an educated woman writing in English about the benefits and costs of being an Englished African subject today, the figure of a constructed leader of ‘his people’ spouting Shakespeare is an aspirant doomed to fail in a corrupt and hypocritical system. This post-apartheid critique echoes the kinds of criticisms levelled against the men of Plaatje’s ilk by a later generation of angry youth less willing to play the civil game in the face of politics in twentieth-century South Africa.⁶⁹ As I go on to argue in the last chapter, which looks in more detail at Coconut, self-delusional Uncle might be what the Shakespearised coconut has become in post-apartheid South Africa. If, for Plaatje, Shakespeare was the embodiment of what Engish had to offer, in our times Shakespeare may be the embodiment of its empty promises. Given this move towards binary meanings, it remains important to remember that the subject of English – the language, the literature, and the figure of the South African made by and in English(ed) systems of power – becomes evidence for the actual complexity of the apparently oppositional positions English is increasingly invoked to endorse in the current political climate.

The history of Shakespeare in South Africa encapsulates the complex regional history of complicities, contestations, reclamations, and resistances which comprise the true meaning of the coconut. Material privilege, aspiration, identity politics, and race politics all adhere in messy and complicated ways to ‘English’ and to ‘Shakespeare’, as indeed they always have.

The chapters that follow demonstrate this complex, contradictory subject by offering case studies of what Shakespeare has been to, and for, a range of South African subject positions. It becomes clear how often ‘he’ is invoked to shore up an identity binary which draws its power from the privilege which (still) accrues to English and to the whiteness with which it is associated. This is one of Matlwa’s points in Coconut. At the same time, as I have been arguing, the presence of a genuinely South African ownership of Shakespeare – complex, complicit, contradictory as this is – as seen in the work of Plaatje, for example, demonstrates the artificiality of this binary, and exposes discourses of African authenticity as artificial and impossibly nostalgic. It demonstrates the true melange which is by now a paradoxically ‘authentic’ South Africanness. That Shakespeare tends not to be invoked in this context in South Africa is a lesson not only in the politics of exclusion and social and personal power plays in the region. It is also evidence of what it is that still animates the symbolic power of ‘Shakespeare’ and the history of overpowering to which that symbol of English belongs.